Ughhhh I hate waiting rooms. They are the worst, especially if you have children with you, this I have experienced first hand. Our kids are not very good at waiting in general, put them in a WAITING ROOM, and I would rather have oral surgery without medication. It’s a hundred questions, a ton of fidgeting, a bunch of arguments over things that aren’t even real, like what will we name our new puppy? I’m sorry; we are not getting a new puppy, so why are we arguing about a name? Oh right. We are waiting. In a room.

Recently, my Nana had a near fatal reaction to a prescription that landed her in ICU. Sitting in the waiting room with our oldest daughter, I was reminded how miserable that room can be.

Think about it. Have you ever spent time in a waiting room and thought “Well, this is so relaxing”? No. Because they are not relaxing in the least. They have harsh lights, uncomfortable chairs, weird smells, awful coffee, or worse yet, NO coffee and spotty WIFI service.

It’s not fun. Even if you are waiting for a baby to be born, it can seem like torture. Just ask our friends and family that endured New Years Eve and part of New Years Day in 2000 while anticipating the birth of our oldest son.

I honestly think waiting rooms are designed to be unpleasant because they are not meant for long-term stays. Three hours, twelve hours, nineteen hours, it can feel like forever, but it really isn’t. Waiting rooms are just that, a place to WAIT. Waiting sucks. It’s boring. It’s annoying. It can be all levels of depressing and even frightening. That is why it was never intended to be a place to settle or become complacent.

Right now my life is in a waiting room and I HATE it. It’s difficult, it’s inconvient and it feels stagnant. I’ve asked a TON of questions, I have fidgeted and paced and argued about things that aren’t even real, and yet here I sit, waiting. This morning in my journal I wrote

“I’m so frustrated, I feel like I’ve been here, waiting for months, weeks, days for things to happen. I’ve worked, I’ve hustled, I’ve done all I can and all I know to do until there is nothing left to do. And the results? I’m WAITING for them to happen and I’m waiting longer than I think is necessary.”

See that? Longer than what I THINK is necessary. It’s a good thing surgeons and doctors don’t feel pressured to rush during a procedure just so we don’t have to wait. No, when it’s our loved ones who need care, we want the hospital staff to take their time to make sure everything is right.  Sure, we may grow tired, we may be bored and have awful coffee but we know that while we are waiting, things will be fixed.

I think my waiting room and your waiting room experiences are something that we  need to embrace. Not become cozy, because Lord knows we don’t plan on camping out under fluorescent lights and in hard chairs.

Psalms 25:21  says “Use all your skill to put me together, I WAIT to see your finished product” (MSG) We need to be okay with waiting, because ALL the skill that the Creator of the Universe pocesses is being used to put us together. Now, that is a process that we don’t want to rush.

So let’s sit in the uncomfortable waiting room, knowing that the finished product will be worth the agony of the wait, for in our waiting, we’ll gain the strength we will need to add to the next chapter in our stories.

xoxo

Gena